USING WIKIS AS A LEARNING ENVIRONMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A PEDAGOGICAL EVALUATION

Wikis are increasingly gaining more and more importance in higher education, because of their potential to support student participation and collaboration. One of the most important wiki technologies is MediaWiki - a collaborative web-based technology that allows multiple users to easily and quickly contribute to upload, build, create, and develop content on the web. The aim of this paper is to use MediaWiki technology to develop wiki applications and allow students to take responsibility for creating shared knowledge with their classmates by means of group interaction and collaborative writing.

The added value of wikis lies in their potential power to support knowledge construction and collaborative learning. Wikis can be used in project development with peer review, as a group authoring tool, to track a group project, to collect data for a class project, and for tracking research groups. In addition, teachers can use wikis for collaborative curriculum design and for course content authoring. Wiki-based collaboration learning environments provide teachers and educators with potentially significant opportunities for creating socially engaged tasks that require active student participation and knowledge construction.

The research goal of this work is to investigate the pedagogical value of wiki applications and MediaWiki technology to support collaborative writing projects by identifying the factors that may have potential for improving students’ learning outcomes. The pedagogical value can be defined as the capacity of the students to be engaged in constructivist and collaborative learning, and being motivated in developing wiki applications by means of MediaWiki technology.

This paper proposes four dimensions to assess the pedagogical value of wikis: learning, motivation, collaboration, and technology.

The learning dimension relates to the capabilities of wikis to improve student learning outcomes through active knowledge construction. To promote student learning, wiki applications need to be learner-centered, where the students themselves control how to learn, explore, and navigate through the study material based on their needs and preferred learning styles.

The motivational dimension relates to the extent to which the wiki applications and WikiMedia technology stimulate the students to be engaged and involved in developing wiki applications by means of MediaWiki technology.

The collaborative dimension means that wiki applications stimulate students to work together to reach a common goal. True collaboration requires one student to modify the content posted by another student and re-working the writing of others. This is important because wiki-based applications are considered as inherently social activities as good solutions are developed in collaboration with other students.

The technology dimension of wikis involves techniques for ensuring a trouble-free interaction with the software tool while the other pedagogical dimensions (learning, motivation, and collaboration) aim at supporting the knowledge construction process, group writing, and students’ involvement in the wiki application.

The findings describe the students’ perceptions of the wiki applications and MediaWiki software tool by means of peer review, self-evaluation, and survey questionnaires. The findings are concerned with learning, motivation, collaboration, and technological issue of wikis.